The Ship of Dreams: Chapter 8

A Serialized Novel

Noah, from the book of Genesis, of our creation, was a well-known drunk. Little more than an amateur, he was tasked with the building of God’s great Arc. Perhaps here we see why so few wanted to board his great ship. People do not typically trust the works of the town drunkard who suddenly has been sudden conversing with animals and claiming that they have been given divine providence from God himself.

“Sure, he did Noah,” one can almost hear them say behind sarcastic sniggers. If he lived in our current epoch in time, we could take the vision a little further, seeing him being carted off to some asylum for such a claim.

Nevertheless, Noah, seemingly unfit for his duty built his grand Arc, and it withstood forty days and nights of the most ranging and relentless rainfall and floods. The Arc was in composition made of nothing more than wooden frames, beams, and planks.

In stark juxtaposition, almost the exact opposite was true in the case of Titanic. She was not built by one man alone. Instead, countless men worked around the clock from the point of her conception to the time that she spent at sea in order to see that it was the greatest ship that was ever built.

No, it was not but one amateur that built the ship of dreams. Financed by John Piermont Morgan, the world’s wealthiest man, allowed for a microcosm of individuals that were tasked with the construction of such a grand scale. Andrews, the brilliant architect that he was, oversaw every detail of this. The very same that orchestrated the hundreds of intellectual and able body men so that they could craft his ship fitted with the finest steel that made up its great panels, and some three-million oversized rivets that held them in place. As opposed to Noah, each of these men was professional in their trade.

It is just another exemplification of how Titanic has and will continue to be analyzed and scrutinized in every context from its structural integrity to the religious implications. There is no greater illustration of this than that of this analogy of Noah’s Ark.

When Noah’s fabled boat set sail, all the heavens conspired to destroy everything on all the face of the earth save that one vessel. The heavens transpired to achieve this by flooding both land and sea. The internal self, the inner world that was preserved in that entity remained alive and whole, while all the exterior world was destroyed. It was unequivocally the worst conditions imaginable that a people on a ship could set out to face.

On the crisp and bitter night of April 14th, 1912, the Titanic faced conditions that were near perfect for any other standard. It was all the passengers could rave about all the night long as the sun finally came to rest below the watery horizon.

Once the final meal had been served, Titanic glided through the sea likened to a black phantom of the night, albeit it provided the only source of light for miles of light, but the thick smoke that billowed from it obscured even that. Only the faint songs that issued from her great halls made her known to the black and dark night. Yet, the sounds of the waves crashing into the sides of the ship worked away at concealing that too. She was an assassin into the night, and the night, and assassin onto her. Being as dark black as she was, Titanic was the living personification of every bad omen uttered about her, likened to the angel of death.

Of all the phenomena to be experienced on God’s green earth, there is nothing like a starry night from the deck of a ship in the middle of the ocean. It is the feeling of being one with the abyss. It is as if all the world is a darkened sphere divided into two. The bottom half consists of the dark depths of the ocean’s waves, that one cannot quite make out even though they know it is there, and what it is. As for the other half, it contains all the ethers lined with entire constellations and galaxies that one would never have known even existed had they seen them from that precise vantage point. This provides the only light and source of navigation for even the most experienced sailor. Overall, there is nothing quite like it.

And, on that fateful night, all that anyone could talk about was of what a cool, calm, and cloudless night it was. For the passengers, it was all that they could ask for. They had the best view of the stars that money could buy. They had it all as the saying goes. It was all very peaceful and tranquil, and they could not ask for anything else. To them, Titanic was but a giant watery cradle that was rocking them gently to sleep.

What they were not aware of was the way that the darkness and the calmness of the night acted only to cloak the environmental hazards that had largely been in play in a translucent veil that seemed almost preordained. Yes, on that night it was as if all the universes had collaborated and conspired against Titanic for daring to challenge nature.

For months prior, a high-pressure cell that had formed in the central Atlantic region resulted in a thick and perpetual northwest wind over that stretch of ocean. These northwest winds were accountable for much of the weather conditions that Titanic faced that night. Not only that, but they were also responsible for pushing the unforeseen field of ice further out into the Atlantic than was typical for any other year.

Now, there are five different types of icebergs that are based on the bergs' age. The oldest of which is of what is referred to as black icebergs or blue icebergs. Throughout the ages, it has been the black iceberg that the seafaring man has grown to fear the most, it being the most dangerous of all. It is a damn shame too because they are the most magnificent and beautiful of them all.

The black iceberg is not named as a result of its color. Instead, it is named as such because of the strange phenomena that it creates in the ocean water. These icebergs appear crystalline and formless, almost non-existent at night which is why they are the most dreaded.

It was icebergs of this similitude that the northwest wind dragged in and that littered the ocean’s surface like an icy minefield. Due to such circumstances, they had broken from a much larger glacier or ice shelf, with many of them having seen some tens of thousands of years on this earth, and that would last many more. It was this glassy and frozen graveyard of an ice field that Titanic had been warned about on numerous occasions.

And the elements at hand were much more relentless than that even. Black icebergs were dangerous enough as it is on any other occasion. However, the night of April 14th, 1912, was made even more pitch black because of a new moon. Guided only by the lights issuing forth from the ship, as well as the faint luminosity of the stars, visibility was next to none, making it next to impossible to make out any objects in the waters below.

As if that were not enough, disaster was written even in the very atmosphere that surrounded them, as if the events that would soon take place were truly written in the stars. It was one that acted as a ghoulish wraith following them through the night.

These factors combined are the prime and necessary requirements for a curious maritime spectacle known as super refraction. This happenstance is a secondary byproduct of thermal inversion at sea. Thermal inversion occurs whenever colder air lay in pockets of warmer air while being subjected to high pressure as was the case in the Titanic sailing from Gulf stream waters into that of the Labrador current on that specific night.
At the time, both super refractions and thermal inversion would have been concepts that not even Captain Smith himself would have been privy to, but the effect that takes place is that of a kind of optical illusion or a mirage at sea by virtue of how it bends light. The occurrence of thermal inversion manifests by creating a false and distorted horizon in the distance while obscuring any objects in the water. It would explain why officers at this time reported perceiving a kind of haze or the numerous ways that every ship in the nearby area had difficulties making out the events of the night.

Any one of these conditions shows why the words cold, calm, and cloudless was the stuff of any sailor’s nightmares on such a night. Experienced sailors relied on choppy waters and the tides of the sea to make out any object floating on its surface. At the very least, they allow them to make out the outline of a thing in the distance as the waves wash up against the sides. Smooth motionless waters removed the only prayer of a chance of detecting anything in such complete and total darkness.

In these circumstances, the only thing that they had to rely on were the stars themselves, or rather, the lack thereof. Under such complete darkness, any massive area that blotted out the starry night and that was more blackened than its surroundings indicated a possible obstacle in the waters ahead.

What was most fascinating about the ocean's stillness at that time was the way that it seemed every feat of nature set the stage for it to be exactly that way, as if it were the calming eye of a raging hurricane. For in the weeks and months prior to that night, the Atlantic had been subject to giant tides that helped guide the great icebergs into place. The northwest winds acted to aid the process.

These tremendous tidal waves were the result of a rare astrological event where both the sun and the moon are at their closest point of approach to the earth which has a colossal impact on the planetary tidal waves by influencing the gravitational pull on the ocean. This specific phenomenon is one that takes place approximately once every one-thousand-year or so and is arguably the most compelling argument that it was so fated. It is remarkable to consider that every environmental variable made it precisely so.

Titanic took a swing at nature. And in turn, she blinded it while providing a false sense of peace, then used all the heavens, the tides, and the winds to hurl a ten-thousand-year-old piece of earth at her, and it was stationary when it hit. And mother nature saw to it that it redefined smooth sailings, seeing to it that all the elements combined created calm, still, and motionless waters. Mother nature is a savage; she creates the perfect illusions. That divine Goddess pitched the perfect fastball and even provided ample warning that she had done so.

All of it was very unusual. The factor of the field of ice alone was an anomalous occurrence that was almost unheard of. On any other year, the route that passed through the intersecting coordinates of 41–56 degrees North and 50–14 degrees West was generally a preferred and reliable course for ocean liners. Typically speaking, of all the ice that makes its way out from Greenland and the Canadian Arctic, only a handful, no more than four or five, ever make the long trek to this part of the Atlantic.

What is seen here is the way that Titanic was ostensibly the unparalleled opposite of Noah’s legendary Ark. God’s servant and his family wandered through chaotic and perilous waters that were of apocalyptic proportions, and still it remained intact. Titanic on the other hand experienced what would have been a perfect climate under any other circumstances, and still, she was compromised.

And just as the internal world remained whole in Noah’s situation, with hell raging in the exterior world, this was not the case with Titanic because all the exterior world was in complete and total solace with the interior of the thing being destroyed. This time around it would only be the ship itself that would be flooded, not the other way around.

In this instance, the only exception was that of the animals that Noah’s ship housed. While Titanic did not store any animals in her cargo, except for some rats, and a faithful canine that would go on to survive the ordeal, the third class was certainly treated as such; all the degraded and made a spectacle, caged in the bottom half of the ocean liner at the social elite’s amusement and entertainment.

In more ways than one, the icebergs that surrounded them were the most fitting symbol of the social hierarchy not just on Titanic, but the world over. The third class was like the solid mass that lie immersed and unseen underwater yet making up most of the thing. One that had no leader and that wondered with no direction into the void. Aimlessly so, with the tip and all the middle and upper class resting atop its shoulders being the part that ever goes noticed. And it was why the iceberg with its great submerged portion was the most appropriate means to remind the first and second class of people of this fact.

Although the passengers had the slightest clue of any of these things, they were well known to Titanic’s Captain and his crew of Officers. For reasons such as these, none of them harbored any similar feelings of awe or excitement as that their traveling counterparts. Far from it. It was the thoughts of a dark, cool, cold, and cloudless night with cautionary warnings of ice fields ahead that plagued their minds for the evening.

It was for the very same reason that most of Titanic’s officers found their posts stationed along the vast boat deck. All eight of them outside along the long-polished planks. They were young men, most of whom were still in their early thirties, except for Murdock and one other office. Courageous able body men that they were, they became wrought with worry as the conditions of the night weighed down. Each of them felt this sense of caution, as if in anticipation of bad things to come. If they had consulted the I-Ching as Stead had done, perhaps they would have yielded hexagram ten, in that suggested treading carefully.

There was a growing reluctance shared amongst them as they made their rounds. The surface of the ocean below them was measured at twenty degrees Fahrenheit, and at their stations, the outside temperature was around twenty-eight, which was a drastic change from the typical forty. With howling winds beating against them at twenty-two knots in such a climate, they felt as if they were trapped in an icebox, and perhaps they were. Few of them grew numb, and all of them eventually had to throw on their woolen jackets and their leather gloves to protect them from their current setting.

The final variable in the backdrop of this setting was that of Titanic itself, and her speed, amidst everything else, served as the fatal blow in its state of such dire straits. In light of everything that Captain E.J. Smith and his crew knew on that calm, cool, and otherwise peaceful night, the Titanic would still race across the surface of the ocean at twenty-two knots, which was one below the ship’s top speed.

No one is quite sure as to why the captain made this decision. There are those that argue that he finally buckled to Ismay’s demands to try and reach their destination ahead of schedule, or to beat the Olympic’s crossing time. That it was an attempt to appease him. Others maintain that he made this choice in order to control the fire that was billowing away in Titanic’s coal bunker.

In either case, the Titanic was traveling too fast in the ice-infested sea. The issue of the ship’s speed was but one of the reasons that people would go on to criticize Captain Smith for not handling the situation adequately enough, or with the seriousness that the situation deserved. But then again, people always need a villain to point the finger of blame on. Villain or not, at 10:00 p.m. on the night of April 14th, 1912, the Titanic charged through the Atlantic were off in the distance in front of it lay a giant black mass that obscured the night sky for an area of four-hundred feet.